New thinkings in the politics, social fields and of the critic of knowledges – Notes for an exchange, research and mutual training project (Spring 2016)

We meet in an area of intersection between different researches and experimentations, with a consistency of reflections and new inspirations that links together politics, social and critical knowledges fields.

These meetings are situated inside a globalization at large (different points in the network of our meetings, in France, in the Middle-East), it aims to provide an appropriate context for exchange, research, and mutual training, and to allow the research and exchanges to develop, along a network of sites in different situations, in and outside of the university.

In the continuity of our meetings, we would like to propose to elaborate a common research and training program, within a transdisciplinary field of education sciences, philosophy, political sociology, gender studies, and Arts & Media. A common project in network between the Mesopotamia Academy of Social Sciences in Qamishli, the Research Institute of Humanities MEDFIL and the laboratories in Paris VIII Saint-Denis University of Experice-Experience Cultural Ressources Education and LLCP-Contemporary Logics in Philosophy Laboratory, with the organization of a regular seminar, translation and publications, and training sessions.

The project has several dimensions:

Introducing the interdisciplinary methodologies to create open spaces for meeting and discussion, and to outline the integrity of practices in the fields of the research and its implementation.

Tracing of the figures of the research through the translation.

Extending for the research the necessary poetic sensibility with the Arts & Media.

Giving all signification for the fact that the disciplines of interdisciplinary go through the indisciplinarity that build the common points of our respective researches as a collective research.

Constructing a network of different sites and situations where the meeting is an initial element, an open constellation, as in the city names in a map in fragments: Paris, Tehran, Istanbul, Kobanî, Beirut, Jerusalem, Haifa, Cairo, etc. These are the terms of relationships, which is opened to the unexpected.

Drawing research project that starting point is in the movement of itinerant theories and practices.

Producing of critical approaches of the history of the space of Middle-East shaped by Sykes-Picot and the conditions of the globalization in its social, political, economic, circumstances.

This approach deals with the complex questions of the multiple affiliations, forms of extraterritoriality, the issue of borders, the new expressions of living together, theoretical productions of the post-national, translation and knowledge’s politics.

Political Studies in the Near and Middle-East Seminar – Critical and New Thinkings in Epistemology and Politics

The starting point of this seminar is in the expressions of traveling theories which, where a conceptual chain was lacking (exiles, wars, and displacements, situations of subalternization in life, law, and the language, separations), is written in a cartography of narratives where statements and utterances can not be disjointed. These narratives are the concrete syntagms resulting from the encounter, the forms of life, their persistence, and the form of their historicity.On the other hand, the conflicts that cross the Middle East today are not separable from the history of the Sykes-Picot agreements. It is also necessary to approach them from a broader analysis of the conditions of globalization, this other name of colonization, in its political, social, economic, etc. dimensions.It is from a constant decentering, a decentering from which derives a difference in which the other names of history are inscribed, that the possible new forms of politics could be said.From there, this seminar focuses on the new forms of political agency and the post-national theoretical productions, the genealogies of violence and the languages ​​of memory, the construction of multiple affiliations, the experience of borders, the politics of knowledge and translation.

Naji El Khatib (MEDFIL Humanities Institute) – 1. The palestinian memory, places of memories: between exile and return / 2. ODS in Palestine and post-nationalism / 3. People without States and the Sykes-Picot heritage

Sonia Dayan-Hezbrun (MEDFIL Humanities Institute) – The State: From the colonial enterprise to the decolonization vision

2017-2020 Consortium Agreement with Paris 8 Saint-Denis University towards a program of Middle East and the Global Polical Studies and International Exchange: a framework for a program development and support partnerships of the program. Consortium Read more…